President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia seems to be burying the idea that he can somehow cooperate with the Trump administration to end the conflict in Syria. CreditPool photo by Dmitri Lovetsky..
MOSCOW — If Russia once maintained at least a semblance of distance from President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, it rushed to his defense after the American missile strike ordered by President Trump on Thursday. The attack cemented Moscow more closely than ever to the notorious Syrian autocrat.

Even as the United States condemned Mr. Assad for gassing his own citizens and held Russia partly responsible, given its 2013 promise to rid Syria of chemical weapons, the Kremlin kept denying that Syria had any such capability.

By championing Mr. Assad and condemning American “aggression,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia seemed to be burying the idea that he could somehow cooperate with the Trump administration to end the conflict on his terms.

The solidarity with Damascus is likely to cause problems for Russia in the long run, analysts said, although Mr. Putin probably cannot be persuaded to loosen his embrace any time soon.

OPEN GRAPHIC
Mr. Morozov and other analysts consider the policy problematic for various reasons.

Russia Partly to Blame
First, Mr. Trump and his secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, have painted Russia as at least partially responsible for the carnage among civilians that was fomented by the Assad government.

“Moscow’s main problem is not that the U.S. made a strike but that Trump and Tillerson have toughened their rhetoric on Syria and Assad,” said Vladimir Frolov, a foreign affairs analyst and columnist for Republic.ru.

He added, “They have said that Russia is responsible for Assad’s actions and that it didn’t fulfill its responsibilities in terms of chemical weapons disarmament.”

The chemical attack in the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun on Tuesday killed more than 80 people and afflicted hundreds more. Turkey said on Thursday that sarin, a banned nerve agent, had been used.

The United States responded by firing almost 60 cruise missiles at the air base, which housed the warplanes used in the chemical attack. The local governor said five military men and two civilians died.

Winning at Any Cost?
Second, in continuing deadly attacks on civilians, Mr. Assad seems to want to pursue a military victory at any cost, putting a lie to Russia’s statements that a negotiated settlement is the sole solution.

That risks dragging out a war that Mr. Putin has depicted at home as quick, cheap and easy at a time when many Russians have been struggling economically. Trying to keep the length and cost of the war down is a crucial reason that the Russians will avoid escalating any conflict with the United States, analysts said.

“Russia wants to end the conflict and to diminish its military and economic presence,” said Andrei Frolov, a defense analyst and the managing editor of the Moscow Defense Brief.

With the next Russian presidential campaign scheduled to start by the end of the year, he said, “there is no need to continue a war outside the country with a weak explanation for the Russian people why Russia is staying there.”

A poll by the independent Levada center in March found that almost 20 percent of Russians already believed that the country’s military involvement in Syria made no sense.

Dangerous Alliance
Third, the Assad alliance could undermine one of Mr. Putin’s main goals for entering the war: to try to make Russia a player on the world stage again as the indispensable broker in the Middle East.

Protecting Mr. Assad could further repulse countries that Moscow has been courting, like Turkey and Israel, analysts said — not to mention much of the world.

In the months immediately after Russia deployed its military in Syria, Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, used to say things like, “We don’t support Assad; what is important for us is to preserve Syrian statehood.”

After the attack, the ministry cranked out a statement lauding Syria for its “fierce battle” against “international terrorism.”

Aleksei V. Makarkin, the deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, a think tank based in Moscow, said, “The longer Russia supports Assad, the more dependent it is on him.”

“At the beginning, there was some talk about replacing him, even if gradually,” he said, but that talk has evaporated.

Mr. Trump, during his campaign, seemed to champion the idea, as well, questioning the need for sanctions, suggesting that Crimea probably did belong to Russia and repeatedly praising Mr. Putin as a strong leader. He endorsed the idea that the two countries together fight the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS.

While that raised suspicions in the United States of collusion, it was welcomed in Russia as a new dawn in relations.

The illusions began fading as Mr. Trump or his allies reversed many of those positions one by one, and the attack on Syria pretty much buried them.

On Friday, the rubric on Rossiya 24, the state satellite news channel, for some of the coverage of the attack was “Kaptain Amerika” imposed over a zombielike figure with dead eyes.

“The rest of the pre-election fog has melted away,” Dmitri Medvedev, Russia’s prime minister, wrote on his Facebook page. “Instead of the mass-circulated narrative about a joint fight against our main enemy, ISIL, the Trump administration has demonstrated that it will be fiercely fighting the legitimate government of Syria.”

The first consequence on the ground, analysts said, is that Syria and the Russian military will feel less restricted than ever in attacking forces they think are aligned with the West and that they have accused of being terrorists.

Some Syrian rebel groups subsidized by the United States and its regional allies have formed battlefield alliances with fighters from Al Nusra, the affiliate of Al Qaeda in Syria.

“Now Russia in Syria can oppress and destroy opposition forces without regard to the United States and its position,” Mr. Frolov, the defense analyst, said.

Exclusive: As President Trump was launching his missile strike against Syria, CIA Director Pompeo and other intelligence officials weren’t at the table, suggesting their doubts about Bashar al-Assad’s guilt, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

There is a dark mystery behind the White House-released photo showing President Trump and more than a dozen advisers meeting at his estate in Mar-a-Lago after his decision to strike Syria with Tomahawk missiles: Where are CIA Director Mike Pompeo and other top intelligence officials?

The photograph released by the White House of President Trump meeting with his advisers at his estate in Mar-a-Lago on April 6, 2017, regarding his decision to launch missile strikes against Syria.​

Before the photo was released on Friday, a source told me that Pompeo had personally briefed Trump on April 6 about the CIA’s belief that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was likely not responsible for the lethal poison-gas incident in northern Syria two days earlier — and thus Pompeo was excluded from the larger meeting as Trump reached a contrary decision.

At the time, I found the information dubious since Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and other senior U.S. officials were declaring quite confidently that Assad was at fault. Given that apparent confidence, I assumed that Pompeo and the CIA must have signed off on the conclusion of Assad’s guilt even though I knew that some U.S. intelligence analysts had contrary opinions, that they viewed the incident as either an accidental release of chemicals or an intentional ploy by Al Qaeda rebels to sucker the U.S. into attacking Syria.

As strange as the Trump administration has been in its early months, it was hard for me to believe that Trump would have listened to the CIA’s views and then shooed the director away from the larger meeting before launching a military strike against a country not threatening America.

“On Tuesday, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians. Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.”

As much as Trump stood to benefit politically by acting aggressively in attacking Syria — and thus winning praise even from his harshest critics — the idea that he would ignore the views of the U.S. intelligence community on an issue of war or peace was something that I found hard to believe.

So, I put aside what I had heard from the source about the discordant Pompeo-Trump meeting as the sort of tidbit that may come from someone who lacks first-hand knowledge and doesn’t get all the details right.

After all, in almost every similar situation that I had covered over decades, the CIA Director or the Director of National Intelligence has played a prominent role in decisions that depend heavily on the intelligence community’s assessments and actions.

President Barack Obama and his national security team monitor the Special Operations raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. (White House photo by Pete Souza)​

For instance, in the famous photo of President Obama and his team waiting out the results of the 2011 raid to kill Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, CIA Director Leon Panetta is the one on the conference screen that everyone is looking at.

Even when the U.S. government is presenting false information, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s 2003 speech laying out the bogus evidence of Iraq hiding WMDs, CIA Director George Tenet was seated behind Powell to lend credibility to the falsehoods.

At the Table

But in the photo of Trump and his advisers, no one from the intelligence community is in the frame. You see Trump, Secretary of State Tillerson, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, strategic adviser Steve Bannon, son-in-law Jared Kushner and a variety of other officials, including some economic advisers who were at Mar-a-Lago in Florida for the meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

However, you don’t see Pompeo or Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats or any other intelligence official. Even The New York Times noted the oddity in its Saturday editions, writing: “If there were C.I.A. and other intelligence briefers around, … they are not in the picture.”

That made me wonder whether perhaps my original source did know something. The claim was that CIA Director Pompeo had briefed Trump personally on the analysts’ assessment that Assad’s forces were not responsible, but – then with Pompeo sidelined – Trump conveyed his own version of the intelligence to his senior staff.

In other words, the other officials didn’t get the direct word from Pompeo but rather received a second-hand account from the President, the source said. Did Trump choose to rely on the smug certainty from the TV shows and the mainstream news media that Assad was guilty, rather than the contrary view of U.S. intelligence analysts?

After the attack, Secretary of State Tillerson, who is not an institutional intelligence official and has little experience with the subtleties of intelligence, was the one to claim that the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a “high degree of confidence” that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib province.

While Tillerson’s comment meshed with Official Washington’s hastily formed groupthink of Assad’s guilt, it is hard to believe that CIA analysts would have settled on such a firm conclusion so quickly, especially given the remote location of the incident and the fact that the initial information was coming from pro-rebel (or Al Qaeda) sources.

Thus, a serious question arises whether President Trump did receive that “high degree of confidence” assessment from the intelligence community or whether he shunted Pompeo aside to eliminate an obstacle to his desire to launch the April 6 rocket attack.

If so, such a dangerous deception more than anything else we’ve seen in the first two-plus months of the Trump administration would be grounds for impeachment – ignoring the opinion of the U.S. intelligence community so the President could carry out a politically popular (albeit illegal) missile strike that killed Syrians.

According to my understanding s400( Pantsir for s400 defence) only defend cruise missiles within 25km. S400 is not deployed anywhere near the base which is targeted. @YarS please correct me if I wrong

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Really no one knows because its has never happened. US has about 3500 cruise missiles but about 500 of them are designed to carry nuclear war heads.

I kind of doubt if the Sam 300/400/500 are as good as the Russians say. Saddam had about the best air defense system that Russia sold and it was useless. Once Russia sells a system the USA Israel is going to get access to the system and learn its weakness.

According to my understanding s400( Pantsir for s400 defence) only defend cruise missiles within 25km. S400 is not deployed anywhere near the base which is targeted. @YarS please correct me if I wrong

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It depend from many factors, first of all - surface topography, info from airplanes like AWACs, ECM-situation, etc. S-400 from Hmeimme airbase by himself can target cruise missiles only after they crossed Lebadon mountains. Simultaneously S-400 can strike only 36 targets, and there were 36 Tomahawks downed. May be it is mere coincidence, may be not.